Mile
Zero

October 5, 2011

When it comes to Deus Ex, I'm a contrarian: I think the second
game was far better than the first, which was an ugly, buggy, tedious
mess. Having finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it's probably
the best of the three, assuming you skip its bizarre
racial stereotypes. That's not just because the mechanics are
better--although they are--or that the engine no longer looks like a bad
Dark Forces mod. What I find most praiseworthy about Human
Revolution is the way it actually engages with science fiction on a
level deeper than laser swords and nano-babble.

Fundamentally, this is a game about progress. The developers use
transhumanism and human enhancement (not to mention stabbing people with
your robot arm-swords) as proxies for the ways that innovation interacts
with class, with government, and with culture. This is all pretty
standard fare for sci-fi, but it's something few games set in a science
fiction world bother to raise. You don't see Gears of War
dwelling on the morality of war, or Portal (for all its genius)
drawing explicit lines to our relationship with science. Whatever
annoyances it might have, I really respect Human Revolution for
grabbing a big concept and taking it seriously.

This thoughtfulness extends all through the art design, which is
genuinely great--probably the best since Mirror's Edge, in the
way that it's both striking and still very much a video game. The visual
theme that Eidos Montreal reportedly wanted to emphasize was Rembrandt,
which means there's a lot of grainy, gold light bathing the scenes,
outlined in clean digital polygons for interactions. The character
animation during dialog could be sharper, but the visual worldbuilding
is very thorough, and there are a couple of setpieces (like the
all-white room late in the game) that are quietly impressive.

The attention to visual detail extends to the costuming, which really
carries the Renaissance theme. But this is also a game about people
merging with machines, and so mixed in with the capes and the ruffled
collars are garments made with a kind of "low-polygon model" structure
of tesselated triangles--as if some future fashion designer will be
inspired by Battle Area Toshinden. Which is not, honestly, at all
implausible, and is a pleasant change from the usual dystopian leather
fetish. Even the body armor worn by the soldiers evokes a combination of
iron plate and corsetry. Also nice: Adam Jensen's obligatory black
trenchcoat is topped by shiny black velvet shoulder panels in a floral
pattern, which I think is what all the hip cyborg messiahs are wearing
this season.

There's a long history of games that compete visually based on fidelity
and/or horsepower, like every iD title ever. And then there are games
that go for highly-stylized rendering methods, like Team Fortress
2 or Wind Waker. Human Revolution operates somewhere
between the two: it's a mostly-realistic engine, even one that's a
little bit behind the times, being used to render a realistic world with
a strong editorial style. It has a fashion sense, so to speak, one that
helps to pull together its theme and world. I think that's part of why
it feels so much more cohesive than the generic cyberpunk of the
previous two.

But does it ultimately succeed in making a statement? It's one thing to
raise provocative questions, but another to actually pose an argument. I
think the real shame is that Human Revolution gets held held back
at the last moment by being a Deus Ex title, meaning that it
privileges pointless choice over point of view. Late in the game--late
enough that it's comically irrelevant to the plot--two characters make
their pitches for and against regulation of human enhancement
technology. Reach the very end (this is no spoiler) and you'll be given
the option of picking one of those plans, or two other equally-unsubtle
choices, all of which are literally just a button-press away from your
final save point. It is, just as with the original games, entirely
cosmetic and consequence-free.

The problem is not that the developers needed to pick a side, but that
the final choice feels needlessly reductionist. It comes after hours of
stories that examine the costs and benefits of progress from all angles:
exploitation of workers, addiction, medical advances, relationships, and
scientific ethics. Human Revolution does a surprisingly good job
of presenting these with nuance and depth, and then asks you to pass
judgement on the whole issue in the most biased way. In contrast,
Bioshock set up its political and economic dilemmas, stewed them
with a set of rich characters (goofy final boss aside), and then just
left them there for you, an approach that's substantially less
insulting than "Press 1 to exalt Ayn Rand's values of selfishness, press
2 to embrace socialist altruism..."

In the end, that's why I suspect that RPS's John Walker was right to say
that this is smartly-made by smart people, but it's not a smart
game. Mechanically, it's sound: I enjoyed playing it much more than
I ever thought I'd like a Deus Ex game. It looks great. It
presents a complex world filled with interesting situations. And then it
undermines much of that credibility--not all, but a large majority--by
reverting to Choose Your Own Adventure in the name of nostalgia. This,
fellow gamers, is why we can't have nice things.